#33: Witch Hunt
The hunting genre meets horror… but the result is underwhelming
This review was originally posted to Twitter on January 10, 2019
Initial release: 2018
Platform: PC
Developer: Andrii Vintsevych
From the weirdo who gave us the awful Gynophobia (of which RPS rightly savaged the early access version) comes… a horror-themed hunting game in Colonial America? Okay.
(Full disclosure: I didn’t finish the game. I didn’t even kill the first “boss” enemy you have to hunt. I found the game simply too goddamn tedious. I didn’t watch the rest on Youtube, either. What’s the point? There’s barely any plot whatsoever.)
First, the good: it’s less aggressively slapped together from Unity assets like Gynophobia, inasmuch as you’re not as likely to notice how half the trees are all the same slightly bent model, all oriented the same direction. On max settings it’s pretty nice-looking, even. Easily the best feature is the fog, the way it shrouds the woods in mist and hangs over the lake. Much of the rest of the environment is done up well, too, with the campfire by the lake a bright beacon to help you find your way back to the slightly greater safety of the cabin. The basic mechanics are all functional, too. Much like Betrayer, you have a pistol and a rifle, and long loading times for each. The guns are well modeled and animated, as is the sword you’re armed with. Different learnable skills help you in your hunt.
The story: you’re an experienced monster hunter in Colonial America (no date given, but stated to be the 1700s) investigating disappearances in a small village. Monsters lurk in the wilderness nearby, and you have to hunt them. That’s it. That’s the whole story.
There are five or six boss monsters that are your main goal, but other monsters populate the woods as well. These range from the mundane (zombies) to the annoying (whisperers —Ii’ll get to those in a bit.) Actually, the monsters are mostly more annoying than anything else. The main mechanic for hunting beasties is a sort of spider-sense, in which you can sense boss monsters from some distance, indicated by an icon and a steady heartbeat. The problem? It works from five hundred meters away, leaving you with only a vague clue of where to look.
Making it worse is that the werewolf (the first boss — I dunno if this applies to the others) is constantly on the move, and more often than not, you lose track of him… probably because you’re dealing with the zillion lesser monsters that come out to nip your heels. You can use monster vision to see what he sees, which costs mana (more on mana in a bit) but it’s mostly useless — you’ve seen one stretch of woods you’ve seen them all, and unless you see an obvious landmark, you might as well not have wasted the mana. Worse, even if you DO know where he is, you can’t cancel out of the spell, which lasts a good ten seconds, and by the time you get there, the motherfucker’s probably long gone.
And when you DO catch up to him, damage him once and he’ll run away, forcing you to keep up the chase, risking attack from lesser monsters and probably dying. And if you lose him, you get to do it all over again.
The other monsters are all a bunch of pricks. The zombies run up to you and slap you around, often hitting you before you’ve had a chance to hit them. Zombie dogs can do tremendous damage very quickly. And then there’s the Deadblinds. And the Whisperers. fuck.
First, the Deadblinds: basically glowing red zombies, you can’t look at them. As long as they’re in your field of view, no matter what distance, you’ll take damage as the screen glows red. Your only hope is to track them down looking askance and kill them quick. It’s stupid.
Even stupider are the whisperers. These guys are probably the only genuine scare in the game, but eventually they just become annoying gits. Nearly-invisible black shadows that whisper indistinctly until aggro’d, at which point they chase you endlessly to give you a jump scare. They can’t be stopped or destroyed, and if you trigger one, you’re screwed — either they take all your mana, or a big chunk of your health if you don’t have any mana left (and you usually won’t.) Your only option if you hear one is to just turn around — they’re too hard to see. It’s a brilliant idea in theory, but it gets old very quickly, especially since they have an annoying habit of hanging about where your main quarry’s supposed to be. And that’s really the crux of the game: good ideas that get old fast.
Oh yeah, the mana system: restoring it is a pain in the ass. The only reliable ways to do it are to kill an enemy, gaining back various amounts of mana, or to sacrifice health at bloody cairns dotting the map. At the very least, your health regenerates… slowly. Even saving the game at the glowing stones that mark save points costs mana. On the plus side, you can fast travel from the lakeside cabin back to the village, and level transitions always save the game. It has the effect of resetting monster spawns, however.
You have a couple of other things to help you. silver crucifixes will hit boss enemies with lightning if they come within 200 meters; watcher totems will point you in the direction of the creature at that moment. You can buy books to unlock more skills. And so on. There’s a map in the cabin, but it’s mostly useless until you buy a compass. But money is scarce, lockpicks are even scarcer (and can’t be bought) and anyway nothing is all that helpful given how much of a pain actually dealing with the beast is.
While there’s some good ideas in this game, and the Colonial American setting is a novel one for horror games (other than Betrayer and, uh, one of the Blair Witch games, there aren’t any as far as I know,) as it stands, I can’t recommend it unless you really like hunting games.
